A few years ago, the road safety authorities in Ireland took a decision: what were then referred to as road “accidents” would henceforth be termed crashes or collisions. People in media management positions were lobbied to reflect on the different meanings attaching to the words and, it was hoped, also change their style.
Most did. The reasoning behind the proposed change was obvious: accidents don’t happen in a vacuum, they are caused, and people need to take greater responsibility for their behaviour. Talk to anyone involved in road safety and ask what single factor contributes most to road crashes, and they will all say human behaviour, most of them relating bad behaviour to speed.
Having spent a good deal of this year looking into one road crash, research that gave rise to this past week's Irish Times series, Anatomy of a Car Crash, two things in particular struck home – apart from the grief the crash inflicted on the family and friends of the two men who died.
The first was the degree of vocation and professionalism that infuses the work of so many of those, all public sector employees, who become involved in the immediate aftermath of a crash. It was clear, both in official briefings, as well as in off-the-record conversations, that gardaí, paramedics, firefighters, hospital and other HSE staff all bring to their work a dedication, and sensitivity, as far removed from the caricature of an uncaring, cack-handed, public sector as it is possible to be.
The second was the huge and ongoing behind-the-scenes efforts, at local and national level, to make the country’s roads safer. Co Mayo, where the crash dealt with in the series occurred, has a road safety officer, Noel Gibbons, who works closely with the Road Safety Authority and local gardaí, monitoring what’s happening on the county’s roads and campaigning, particularly with young people, for a more responsible attitude towards safety. Other counties have a similar approach.
Focus on safety
Behind the scenes at national level, there is also a huge focus on safety, aspects of which are not widely known. It is clear, for example, that the development and maintenance of Ireland’s primary roads network is backed up by a staggering amount of data. What this means is that many decisions relating to safety are based on empirical evidence, rendering them less susceptible to the whim of local politics or determined pressure groups.
How this is done is fascinating.
Embedded into the 5,500 or so kilometres of Ireland’s national primary and secondary roads, up to and including motorways, are more than 250 barely visible traffic counters. These magnetic sensors record traffic flow, vehicle type, speed, and times of maximum and minimum usage.
“They are monitoring every vehicle,” says Forbes Vigors, of the National Roads Authority (NRA). “They are loops on the road. You will drive along the road and you’ll see two little rectangular loops on the road in your lane. It is a magnetic loop and, as you cross it, it picks up the vehicle going through it. It knows the speed of the vehicle; it knows the vehicle type, [but] it doesn’t know your reg number.”
The information is relayed immediately to the NRA offices in Dublin, giving analysts there an understanding of traffic flow – that is, volume and vehicle type – that allows them give the road a “value” in terms of exposure to risk. The value determines what type of road each route is – or should be, if change is warranted. Once a road has been categorised by type and given a value, the NRA’s safety analyst can gauge what sort of crashes might be expected to occur.
“We expect a certain type of collision to occur on a motorway, but we wouldn’t expect that type of collision to occur on a single carriageway,” says Vigors. “It might be better to say head-on collisions can take place on a single carriageway, but we don’t expect them to take place on a motorway.”
Crucial additional information, and use of sophisticated mapping and information retrieval technology, allows the NRA to create an extraordinary map of Ireland’s primary route network. It is called, somewhat unglamorously, the HD15 map, but it contains a treasure trove of data, currently for internal use only.
Every kilometre of the 5,500km-plus primary road system is individually graded for risk, and colour-coded accordingly. And embedded into each kilometre segment is a wealth of detail on every crash that has occurred within it.
The NRA assigns a traffic volume to a road and then, based on three years’ data, calculates a collision rate. This is the ratio between the number of collisions and exposure to traffic volume.
Network map
The end result is the HD15 map, on which every kilometre of the national primary road network is coloured either blue, green, yellow or red to denote the average collision rate. Into each kilometre segment is also embedded a deep trough of information from Garda crash reports.
The red segments, those with collision rates double what is expected for the type of road, are the ones that attract most attention for deeper research.
At the click of a mouse button, Vigors and colleagues can isolate a segment and see what vehicles were involved in a collision, as well as the circumstances and consequences of each crash. The constant updating of HD15 triggers a review when a red segment shows more than three collisions. The data on each is examined for signs of a pattern. A site inspection may result in a change of signage, cutting back trees or engineering works.
The segment of the N26 on which the Anatomy of a Car Crash series was based is code-coloured blue, suggesting a collision rate twice below what might be expected for that road.
In the three years prior to the crash, there had not been a single serious incident there and, because the New Year’s Day double fatality was wholly related to the human behaviour of one driver, the road remains categorised as before: blue-coded and safe.